Facebook’s Early Investors May Have Much To Like

by: February 3, 2012

Facebook filed to go public this week, and many analysts expect it will be valued between $75 billion and $100 billion on the day of its initial public offering. That would make Facebook more valuable than GM, Ford even Goldman Sachs.

What’s most remarkable is the company has just barely 3,000 employees, and many of them are about to become very, very rich.

There’s this guy named David Choe. Back in the day, Facebook hired him to paint graffiti murals all over the company’s original office space in Palo Alto, Calif. Even Marc Zuckerberg got into the act.

One of the guilty pleasures of an IPO filing is getting to peer inside a company as famous as Facebook and get a glimpse of who owns what. Of course there’s Mark Zuckerberg.

“Obviously, he should be worth a tidy $25 billion,” says Henry Blodget, editor of Business Insider and the bad-boy analyst of the last Internet boom.

This time the bad boys are becoming billionaires. Like Sean Parker.

“The man who in the movie at least said a million isn’t cool a billion is cool,” Blodget says. “And he will have several of them.”

In that movie, The Social Network, Dustin Moskowitz had little more than a cameo. He was Zuckerberg’s college roommate, but he could soon be worth $7 billion.

“If he was down the hall, we wouldn’t be talking about him,” says Michael Stern, who runs the website Who Owns Facebook. He says Moskowitz wasn’t the only winner of the roommate lottery. Zuckerberg’s prep school roommate will get a couple hundred million.

“A lot of people won the lottery here,” Blodget says, laughing.

And, Blodget says, not all of these future billionaires are boys.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg could be.

After her options vest, “she’s going to be one of the richest self-made women ever,” Blodget says.

According to its filings, Facebook has close to 1,100 stockholders. Many more could benefit from restricted stock options, but Robert Frank who writes the Wealth Report blog at the Wall Street Journal and is the author of the new book The High-Beta Rich says this doesn’t mean all these folks will become instant millionaires.

“More than half of this company is owned by just five large shareholders,” he says. “So like wealth in America, wealth at Facebook is very top heavy, concentrated in just a few people at the top.”

In Silicon Valley, it’s become conventional wisdom that Facebook’s IPO will create 1,000 new millionaires. And while that may well be true, Frank says it’s impossible to know for sure.

Even those with a lot of shares will see their wealth fluctuate widely. So the number of millionaires may change on any given day during the next year or two. After all this is a tech stock, and Franks says all this wealth is just on paper — at least for now.